Tuesday, 8 October 2013

On Pornography and Sexual Culture

To new people from the blog carnival: welcome! Please have a look around and subscribe if you'd like to get notifications when I update.Until recently, I’ve pretty much held a live and let live policy
on porn. I figured out it wasn’t for me, and absorbed it into my general
philosophy of not getting upset about things other people do for pleasure as
long as they don’t involve hurting other people. I was aware of course of the
problems of misogynistic and violent and racist content in mainstream porn (not
to mention the issues involved in its production), but it wasn’t really
something I thought about a lot. I think the fact that I didn’t watch porn
myself combined with how much other instances of sexism in popular culture
demand my attention made it possible for me to ignore one of the most
significant places it takes form and flourishes.

The fact is that
the content of porn is a very significant factor in the ways we think about
sex, and the ways we try to have sexual relationships, and it should be
criticized. It should be included in conversations we have about sexism and
rape culture, and not just by extremists on opposite sides of the topic. Yesterday
I attended a panel discussion about these ideas, and it was really wonderful to
see a room full of people – young people, older people, parents, teachers –
willing to think and talk about what people see in pornography and why it
matters. As long as there are a significant number of people (especially very
young people) watching and learning from porn, the content will continue to
permeate our sexual and social culture. Bringing the issue out into the open
and stripping it of some of its taboo is the first step in doing something
about that.

The panel was a part of Auckland University’s project ‘Pornography
in the Public Eye’[1],
which aims to explore the place of pornography in contemporary New Zealand
society. It featured Ema Lyon, the owner and director of D-Vice (a sex-positive
adult store and website) and George Parker, a doctorate student at Auckland
University and a policy analyst at Women’s Health Action, and addressed
questions about pornography, women’s representation, and sexual culture. One of
the first things George asserted was that we need to be careful about defining
what we mean by pornography, because it’s not a singular phenomenon that only
takes offensive and ugly forms. There are people making porn for women, porn
for the queer community, even self-proclaimed feminist porn. What most people
take issue to is mainstream pornography. It’s also important to clarify our
positions on the issue with something more informative than a label like
‘pro-porn’ or ‘anti-porn’, because when these terms are opened and explored
there is usually more agreement between them than disagreement – none of which
is visible at first. Just because someone supports women’s rights does not mean
you can safely assume they’ll be anti-pornography, and just because someone
calls him or herself anti-pornography doesn’t mean s/he is socially
conservative in general.

On the contrary, the general reasons that people get upset about
pornography are the same: the representation of porn actors (especially women)
as objects of sexual gratification, without much or any attention given to
their sexual pleasure, the prevalence of racist and sexist putdowns, the
violence and disregard for consent, and the frequent depiction of unrealistic
bodies and sex-acts. This is pornography that tends to be consumed by straight
men, and it has been created to meet the demands of that market. As a part of
the Pornography in the Public Eye project, Auckland psychology researcher Alex
Antevska asked a series of young New Zealand men what they see in pornography
and why they find it appealing.[2]
In the (mainstream) porn they were familiar with, sex acts such as
‘ass-to-mouth’ (where a man takes his penis directly from a woman’s anus to her
or another woman’s mouth) and the infamous ‘money shot’ (in which a man
ejaculates on the face or body of a woman) were nothing unusual. Violence was
also acknowledged as commonplace, although not a primary reason they were
watching.[3]
Other worrisome tropes discussed at the panel included the depiction of
fellatio so forceful it causes the woman performing it to gag and anal sex
performed without any inclusion of the extensive preparation that necessarily
precedes it (frequently including, apparently, the use of numbing spray on
female actors).

All of this is problematic for a range of reasons. In the first
place, the inclusion of rough and violent acts in mainstream porn normalizes
these activities – that is to say, it encourages the idea that these are a
normal part of everyday sex, and teaches inexperienced viewers that this is
what they should anticipate in their future sexual encounters. It is made more
dangerous by the absence of contextualization and visible consent. Besides all
of this, the exclusion of the incredibly important processes of involved in
making sexual acts comfortable, hygienic and safe from the risks of injury,
STIs and pregnancy naturalizes an image of sex that is dangerously far from
reality.

The people threatened most by this are of course the young men who
grow up with the images in porn as one of their primary sources of sexual
education, and the people they end up having sex with. On Saturday Ema told
several stories about the young men and women who come into her store or her
workshops, and the remedial sex education she’s had to employ to unstick the
ideas they’ve picked up from porn. She has young male customers concerned about
their penis size, because their porn consumption had imposed the actors’
inflated organs as the norm. She works with couples who, because of porn, have
the idea that anal sex is something exclusively performed on a female for a
male’s pleasure. Young women shamefully confess to her their experiences of
being throat-fucked and told that’s how oral sex works. She deals on a regular
basis with customers – especially female customers – who have spent many
unhappy years having sex they didn’t enjoy because they didn’t know it could
happen other ways.

As George pointed out at one point, all of this might not be such
a big deal if our youth were getting comprehensive, informative sex education
from other places. I feel it very important to note that most of the sex acts
routinely depicted in mainstream porn can
take place a part of a normal, healthy sexual relationship between consenting
adults. The roughness we see so frequently in porn is not inherently
disrespectful to women, but without contextualization (which could be done by
showing the woman requesting the acts, for example) it can only be reduced to
that. With porn more easily distributed and accessed now than ever before, it’s
increasingly critical that its messages are interspersed with messages of
gender equality, mutual pleasure and sexual diversity. Unfortunately, the sex
education currently offered to young New Zealanders might not be achieving this
at all. I don’t remember much about my own sex education, but according to
several teachers who attended the panel, the NZ curriculum needs some work.
There are some schools that have managed to leave the clitoris out of
anatomical images entirely, and others who did include it have been pressured
by parents to take it out. This bizarre denial of the most common source of
female sexual pleasure just allows more room for the flourishing of the key
idea at the root of porn’s misogyny: that sex is performed by men, for men, on
women’s bodies.

In a perfect world, mainstream pornography would look like
mainstream sex. Actors would ask and give consent before any sexual activity
and use protection when appropriate. The sex would be diverse and would include
pleasure for all parties involved. Violence, roughness and verbal insults would
only be present after explicit discussion. But in the real world, it’s hard to
imagine how that would work without a five minute conversation at the start of
every porno that everyone would quickly adjust to skipping past. I think it’s
great that there are people making pornography that honors consent and mutual
pleasure and contraception, but it doesn’t surprise me that it’s not more
popular. Ultimately what we have to remember is that pornographers are
interested in only one thing: making money, by whatever means necessary. That
makes porn different from any other media we might criticize for its role in
perpetuating misogyny, much like I did with Blurred Lines, because unlike these
other artists, the people responsible for porn are not interested in the
messages they convey or the effects they have on their audience. I would argue
that as much as we might like to dictate what porn should look like, our time
and resources are better spent on talking about how we want our sexual culture
to look. Because that is exactly what our porn reflects and reinforces.

Perhaps instead of decrying pornography for showcasing
misogynistic, male-centric, unrealistic sex as the norm and ideal, we should
consider how this has come to be the sex men want on their screens, and how we
can progress from this point. The history of male privilege and female
disempowerment, the deplorable gaps in our sex education and the silence
shrouding our sex lives all have a part in this conversation. By drawing porn
(and sex, for that matter) out into the open, to be investigated and discussed
honestly, we can ensure that our youth understand the differences between porn
and sex, and begin to make sense of why they’re not more similar. It also opens
us to all sorts of other interesting questions, like why so many people seem to
be turned on by things they think (or know) they should be ashamed of (how do
we account for the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey and the growing
visibility of BDSM and other kinks?).

The University of Auckland is playing a huge part in creating
these kinds of conversations through their project. For anyone interested in
these questions, I recommend checking out their website in the footnotes. You
can also take a look at this great post by Coley at Tangerina a couple of days
ago on how we often conflate elements of BDSM and pure misogyny/gender violence
when talking about porn. Please leave your thoughts in the comments if you care
to pick up any of these threads, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.